A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  After all, “morality” is a word, an abstract symbolic representation in English made up of eight letters to signify a host of human interactions that involve attachments to other people, internal ideas of right and wrong that also exist as external social norms in the culture, our actual behaviors toward others, and private feelings of guilt and satisfaction. There is no question that the way such interactions are structured and understood vary enormously from culture to culture. It is also true that all human societies have taboos, punishments, and rituals intended to order relations among their members. Luria is pointing to levels of complexity that cannot be reduced to a spot in the brain behind the human left ear or even to an infinitely more complex connection among multiple brain areas because it is not clear that such a reduction is justified. Luria was profoundly aware of the roles culture, language, thought, and reflection play in human neurophysiology.

  In terms of morality, one may want to ask, if moral arrangements are by their very nature interpersonal or intersubjective—that is, they must involve more than one person and therefore more than one brain—is it reasonable to identify morality in the brain of any single individual? Could we have morality without other people? Is it possible to posit an individual person without a relation to another person? A child who is locked up after birth and fed in the dark does not become properly “human.” Runts in a litter usually die. Sadly, human cases of neglect have been discovered and studied. Neglected and deprived children suffer from various problems, including language deficits.56 Are we not dependent on others to be born, grow up, and eventually think moral thoughts? What are the minimal circumstances needed to produce a “moral” person? And won’t the morality of that person be determined by where she or he lives—in the United States, China, Iran, Congo, or New Guinea? Is this a description of the nature/nurture division? Even if we accepted the division, what would nature look like without nurture? Do not factors beyond my own brain need to be considered to truly understand that same brain and the mingled emotions that occurred after my verbal darts were fired at the conference?

  Nature/Nurture: Minds and Pop Culture

  As Whitehead and Kuhn pointed out, such philosophical nuances often disappear among scientists themselves, who fail to examine the foundation of the house they are busy building. In popular science journalism, which comes to us by way of books, newspapers, TV, and the Internet, the houses presented to us are more than likely to have no foundations. The pegs and ropes holding up the landscape are missing. We are treated to descriptions of the brain as if the answers have all been given and no philosophical quandaries are involved. In Proust Was a Neuroscientist, the science writer and journalist Jonah Lehrer devotes a chapter to Stravinsky and explains, “While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.”57 The distinction I believe Lehrer wishes to make is that while most of us can hear sounds even as fetuses, we have to learn to listen to Stravinsky, get used to his sounds, the same sounds that shocked many, but not all, of his early listeners. This seems reasonable enough.

  How this relates to the nature/nurture divide is another matter. Lehrer’s notes/music sentence is preceded by references to brain research. The reader is asked, “Who is in charge of our sensations?” His answer: “Experience.” The philosophical and semantic issues here are significant. How is experience in charge? How far back does experience go? If a fetus develops sensory capacities in utero, are we not born with bodily sensations? A newborn already has developed senses of touch and smell, for example. “Learning,” he continues, “is largely the handiwork of dopamine, which modulates the cellular mechanisms underlying plasticity.” “But dopamine,” he adds, “has a dark side. When the dopamine system is unbalanced, the result is schizophrenia. If dopamine neurons can’t correlate their firing with outside events, the brain is unable to make cogent associations.”58 Like Lehrer’s “experience,” dopamine neurons appear as thinking subjects, active beings that correlate inside and outside.

  Dopamine has been associated with brain plasticity. Two years after Lehrer’s book was published in 2007, the authors of a paper in Klinische Neurophysiologie wrote, “In humans and animals, dopamine improves learning and memory formation. The neurophysiological foundation for this beneficial effect might be a focusing effect of dopamine, and thus an improvement of neuroplasticity. Knowledge about the effects of dopamine on neuroplasticity in humans is scarce”59 (my italics). There is a hypothesis that dopamine is involved in schizophrenia, especially its psychotic symptoms—hearing voices and delusions—but much remains to be understood. The illness has also been related to glutamate, to serotonin, to possible genetic influences, to a long-standing hypothesis that there may be some injury during birth. Some of its symptoms have been associated with a part of the brain—the insula—and to a progressive loss of gray matter in the brain. But why these physiological changes take place is unknown. To write that dopamine’s “dark side” results in schizophrenia is presenting a hypothesis as causal fact.60

  The popularity of books like Lehrer’s, however, books that reduce scientific findings to convenient bite-sized pieces, means that many readers digest half-truths as if they were whole truths. These reductive bits of partial knowledge are then repeated at cocktail parties and lunches and become part of a foggy but general idea-weather. M’s stubborn conviction that a manly feeling of entitlement is genetic is just one of countless examples of ignorance parading as knowledge. Popular science displays a deep-seated bias for establishing a simple reductive correspondence between, say, male confidence and genes or a complex illness, such as schizophrenia, and neurochemistry, in this case the neurotransmitter dopamine. Even Parkinson’s disease, an illness known to be connected to a loss of dopamine, is not cured by simply administering the missing chemical.

  Steven Pinker, an evolutionary psychologist who teaches at Harvard, has published one popular book after another explaining who we human beings are. Pinker, unlike Lehrer, is an academic, a fact that gives his ideas more heft than Lehrer’s. Although he obviously wishes to appeal to a broad popular audience, all of Pinker’s books are heavily referenced. Lehrer’s generalization about dopamine and schizophrenia is documented with a single paper on the subject that offers a hypothetical scenario, not a conclusion. In his laudable desire to demonstrate that art is a form of genuine knowledge that overlaps with discoveries in science, Lehrer repeatedly turns the speculative into the known. Pinker, on the other hand, is a spokesman for evolutionary psychology, and he is aware that his work has been harshly criticized because he has engaged in open debates with some of those critics—to his credit. Nevertheless, like Lehrer, in the work he has published for mass consumption, he has consistently presented his positions as solved scientific truths and answered open questions as if they had been forever closed.

  Like Galton before him, Pinker has come down firmly on the side of nature in the nature/nurture debate. In How the Mind Works, for example, the reader is told that “the biggest influence that parents have on their children is at the moment of conception.” He hastens to add that this does not mean that offspring don’t need love and protection (they should not be locked up in dark rooms), but citing the psychologist Judith Harris, he writes, “Children would turn into the same kinds of adults if you left them in their homes and social milieus but switched all the parents around.”61 This strikes me as patently false. The only way to arrive at such a conclusion is to ignore whole disciplines and dispense with volume upon volume of empirical research in child development, attachment studies, and neurobiology, as if it were so much yellowing documentation piled up for the shredding machine. In the same book, he claims that the consensus among behavioral geneticists is that “much of the variation in personality—about fifty percent—has genetic causes.”62 In The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker advances a scientific version of M’s theory of male entitlement. He makes a long list of what he describes as “reliable” psychological sex differe
nces between men and women. “Of course,” he points out, “just because many sex differences are rooted in biology does not mean that one sex is superior”63 (my italics). These differences may, however, Pinker argues, explain why women are underrepresented in certain fields, including physics and some branches of mathematics.

  Pinker makes many claims for traits rooted in biology. “Biology” here is weighted toward the built-in and fixed, as opposed to the learned and changing, although he freely admits that environment and learning play a role in human development. Pinker likes to present his views as commonsense rebuttals to those intellectual snobs Americans love to hate: Marxists, radical feminists, postmodernists, and just plain old intellectuals. I never fail to be impressed by intellectuals who play the anti-intellectual card while fully enjoying their roles as “academic experts.” Pinker’s ideas influenced the now notorious remarks about women in the sciences made by the former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, in 2005. Summers is an economist, not a geneticist or psychologist, a fact that seemed to have been lost in the media discussion. After he made his public comments, he credited The Blank Slate as having influenced his remarks.64 He had obviously accepted Pinker’s argument as the state of current science on the question because he essentially regurgitated it. Summers cited “many different human attributes” that distinguish the sexes, including “height, weight, propensity for criminality,” as well as “overall I.Q.” and “mathematical ability, scientific ability.” “There is relatively clear evidence that whatever the difference in means—which can be debated—there is a difference in variability of a male and female population.”65 What does this mean?

  Summers was referring to variability in Darwin’s idea of sexual selection. In order to account for animal traits that make no evolutionary sense—the gorgeous but heavy and impractical tail of the peacock, for example—Darwin surmised the reason the tail didn’t vanish through natural selection was because that beautiful tail fan is sexy to peahens. Darwin believed that in all species, including human beings, males are competitive and promiscuous and females are coy and choosy. Darwin accepted that male variability is greater than that of females, even though there was no “hard” evidence for the belief. It was founded on his observations of both animals and people. The Darwinian story has had great power, and it goes like this: Because males in every species have to fight to get the girl, sexual selection has a greater effect on males. Strong males may mate with hordes of females while loser males may mate with just a few or even none, which means the weaker males are more rigorously eliminated than weaker females, and to make this long story short, the result of all this wild male competition and promiscuity is that in the end there are more geniuses and idiots among men than among women—there is greater variation. For Darwin, variation explained why man “is more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman and has a more inventive genius.”66 Pinker, Summers, and a host of others may soften their rhetoric to make it more palatable for a contemporary audience, but the underlying argument is essentially unchanged.

  In 1948, the biologist Angus Bateman published a paper on Drosophila melanogaster, in which he proved that even the humble fruit fly faithfully embodied the rules of sexual selection. The scientist found “sexual selection more effective in males than in females.”67 In his discussion he broadens the scope of his findings: “This would explain why in unisexual [one sex or the other, not both sexes in one] organisms there is nearly always a combination of an undiscriminating eagerness in the males and a discriminating passivity in the females.”68 The Bateman paper did not truly take wing, so to speak, until 1972, when the Harvard biologist Robert Trivers cited it as key evidence for his paper “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” Trivers retold the sexual selection story, emphasizing a point Bateman had made in his 1948 paper: Because a female’s reproduction is limited by the number of eggs she makes during her cycle, once she has been impregnated by a single sperm, she doesn’t need to mate anymore. The male, however, unburdened by expensive eggs and loaded up with cheap sperm, can fly off merrily to his next conquest.69 The Bateman study has been cited a couple of thousand times in the literature and became vital to the argument about variance. Sexual selection means that men occupy the exceptional poles—the dumbest of the two sexes, but also the smartest. Passive, slow, weighed down by pregnancy and nurturing, we women founder somewhere in the fair-to-middling range.

  But the Bateman tale may be fairytale. In 2012, Patricia Adair Gowaty and two of her colleagues at UCLA replicated Bateman’s experiment. Their paper, “No Evidence of Sexual Selection in a Repetition of Bateman’s Classic Study of Drosophila Melanogaster,” demonstrated that Bateman’s methodology was seriously flawed and that there is no way to reach his conclusion from the evidence.70 In recent years, more and more female “promiscuity” in different species has come to light. Gowaty’s study of bluebirds demonstrated considerable “extra-pair copulations” among females.71 Male antler flies are choosier than their female counterparts.72 The sex roles of two-spotted goby, a species of marine fish, depend on when they mate during their short breeding season. Late in the season, females compete intensely with other females for males.73 The bucktooth parrotfish, on the other hand, have a harem system, one male to a bevy of females. If the male is killed, one of the females conveniently turns into a male.74 The female bronze-wing jacana is 60 percent larger than the male, beautifully colored, and polyandrous. One female mates with many male birds, and it is the male bird that guards the nest and nurtures the offspring.75

  The primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has been arguing since the 1980s that the classic version of sexual selection is wrong. In an essay published in 1986, “Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female,” she argues, “Indeed on the basis of what I believe today, I would argue that a polyandrous component is at the core of the breeding systems of most troop-dwelling primates: females mate with many males, each of whom may contribute a little bit toward the survival of offspring.” She offers as one example the fact that the multiple male consorts of a female savanna baboon develop protective relations toward her offspring.76 Hrdy has also reconfigured ideas about the social organization of those early hunting-and-gathering humans that play such a big role in evolutionary psychology. In Mothers and Others, she argues that a single woman could not possibly raise a child alone in that harsh habitat. Siblings, uncles, grandmothers, fathers, and others had to lend a helping hand in childcare or the children would have died.77

  A frequent response to the astounding variety in animal mating habits is to regard each one as another exception to the wider rule. But how many exceptions are needed to overturn a rule? As the zoologist Michel Ohmer points out, “All one needs to do is scan the literature, and hundreds of articles depicting sex role reversal, female competition, male choice, and costly female ornaments, all of which go against classic theory, appear.”78 The failure to replicate Bateman’s results and the exposure of his flawed methods cast doubt on a pivotal study, as do the increasing numbers of species who seem not to follow the old rules. There is good reason to be skeptical of this evolutionary fable with its perpetually tumescent male and shrinking female and begin to think of varieties rather than poles of reproductive strategies among species.

  Was Bateman acting in bad faith, fixing his results to fit the theory? I doubt it. What is most interesting about Bateman’s flawed science may be that it demonstrates a crucial aspect of perception itself, which is now an intense subject of scientific research. There have been many errors such as Bateman’s in the history of science, simply because people often see what they expect to see. Although a version of this idea has been traced back to Ptolemy, and Descartes maintained that habit played an important role in how we perceive the world, it is usually credited to Hermann von Helmholtz, the nineteenth-century biophysicist, who argued that unconscious inference (unbewusster Schluss) is at work in perception. Helmholtz’s idea, which influenced Freud, was ignored for well over a century, but it ha
s seen a lively comeback in contemporary neuroscience.

  Simply put, an observer’s perceptions are unconsciously shaped by his earlier perceptions. We have the visual equipment to see, but we also learn to see and read the world through our experiences in it. Helmholtz stresses that there are many “illustrations of fixed and inevitable associations of ideas due to frequent repetition,” some of which are purely conventional—the letters of a word in relation to its sound and meaning, for example. Helmholtz’s insight that “experience, training, and habit” unconsciously influence our perceptions is now widely accepted.79 In an article in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, Peggy Seriès and Aaron Seitz summarize the research: “Our perceptions are strongly shaped by our expectations. In ambiguous situations, knowledge of the world guides our interpretation of the sensory information and helps us recognize objects and people quickly and accurately, although sometimes leading to illusions.”80 Bateman may well have seen male eagerness and female passivity among his buzzing flies. It was, I suspect, what he expected to see.

  Heritability and Twin Tales

  When I was eighteen, I was in the act of turning away from the mirror, and I suddenly caught a glimpse of my father’s face in my own. I have seen my mother, too, especially now as I grow older. Every once in a while she shines out at me in the reflection of my own older countenance. It goes without saying that we are not self-created, and if we have children we leave something of ourselves in them. It also goes without saying that long before the discipline we now call genetics, it was obvious that we inherited certain features from our parents, features that may be visibly present in us. Just because the relationship between genotype and phenotype is not that of a perfect blueprint or code doesn’t mean George won’t get a nose that may look strikingly like his Aunt Zelda’s. Moreover, many of us have found ourselves “acting” like one of our parents and then catching ourselves doing it, as in, Oh my God, that’s just what my mother used to say (or do). It makes sense to talk about these traits as “inherited” or “heritable.” A heritable trait is simply a trait in an offspring that resembles the corresponding trait in a parent, but that correspondence does not have to be genetic. Rich children are usually born of rich parents, but that does not mean wealth has genetic causes. And what about behaviors? Do I walk like my mother because I grew up with my mother and watched her walk and gesture for years or because I have an inborn proclivity to walk that way?